In Aberration of Starlight Gilbert Sorrentino uses procrastinated seduction not as voluptuous delay but as a gamble that just wasn't in the cards….

This is a tease novel, then, and not very gratifying at that. Tom is a bore and Marie is banal. Instead of discovering or inventing compensations that would free them, as characters, from the anonymous pattern of libido and denial, they back off into the twaddle that surrounds them. Their heads, and what little is in them, dominate the narrative and keep on coming through direct, without much of the narratorial intervention that could render shades of feeling they feel but can't express. Indeed, the narrator, who shows up rarely, seems even more buried in the stuff of their lives than they are…. A list of Marie's favorite poems reveals her awful taste, but not why she likes them—which a sensitive narrator could have explained articulately on her behalf….

The problem with this book is implicit in the title, culled from astronomy. Light from a star comes to us at a seeming angle because we are in motion across the line to the star. There may be an exact fictional equivalent for this heady bit of physics, but a rough one would have something to do with how perceiving a thing distorts it, which of course applies to narrators too. There is even a French notion that narrators who seem to know everything distort the human condition, which perhaps is why Sorrentino adopts a hands-off attitude, giving the novel over the characters' own voices, pretending to suppress the pretense that fiction's based upon. "Make what you can of this," the book implies, "it has just arrived slantwise from some Brooklyn people on holiday in a New Jersey boarding-house in 1939; it's as real as real can be." That's why Aberration of Starlight sounds as if a mediocre stand-up comedian is doing "impressions" of Brooklyn folk in a sort of boardwalk vaudeville that misses its own point.

In the end the trope from starlight seems only an excuse for as lazy a book as possible, with the narrator or sponsor tucked naively into nervous little footnotes…. Imagine what the Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom! might have done with this material and you have some idea of how uninventive American realism has become, and how little virtuosity gets a ventriloquist the label "experimental," when all he has is a twinkle in his I.